Someone to Love (Westcott #1)(65)

It would have been simpler and perhaps kinder for Anna to have said no, but how could she when he had not actually asked the question?

Her eyes focused upon the Duke of Netherby, who was walking along the street in the direction of the house. He was not escorting Aunt Louise today, then, but he was definitely coming here. After he had disappeared inside the door below, she waited for him to be announced.

He paused on the threshold of the drawing room and grasped the handle of his quizzing glass as he looked around, his expression somewhat pained. “I am the first to arrive?” he said. “How very lowering. It would almost suggest an eagerness to see you, Anna. And you are alone? No Cousin Elizabeth to chaperone you? No saucy maid to laugh at my wit?”

“Avery,” she murmured.

His eyes came to rest on her and for a brief moment his glass was trained upon her too.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

He dropped his glass and strolled farther into the room. “There is a way of saying nothing,” he said, “that suggests quite the opposite. All these flowers have come from admirers, I assume? And the ones in the hall and on the landing? I wondered for a moment as I came through the door whether I had moved outdoors rather than in. It was quite disorienting. What is it, my dear?”

The unexpected endearment brought tears welling to her eyes and she turned her head away. “I had a letter at long last this morning from Mr. Beresford,” she said. “The solicitor who dealt with my father’s business in Bath.”

“And?”

“He recalls receiving one letter from my grandfather more than twenty years ago,” she said, “informing him of my mother’s death and asking him to get word to my father. He does not still have that letter, and he cannot remember where it came from except that it was somewhere in the vicinity of Bristol. ‘Somewhere in the vicinity of ’ is very imprecise. It could be two miles away or twenty. It could be north, south, east, or west.”

“West would place it in the Bristol Channel,” he said.

“Perhaps they lived on an island,” she said crossly. “But wherever it was, it was more than twenty years ago. They may both be dead and forgotten by now. There may have been a number of vicars at that particular church in that particular village since.”

“There have not been,” he told her. “The church is St. Stephen’s. The village is Wensbury, twelve miles southwest of Bristol. The vicar is, and has been for almost fifty years, the Reverend Isaiah Snow. He lives in the vicarage beside the church with his wife of forty-seven years.”

She stared at him, as though through a long tunnel. “How do you know?” Her voice came out almost as a whisper.

“I would like to be able to say that I have been on a long and dangerous odyssey throughout the length and breadth of England and Wales, slaying a few dragons along the way, on a quest to discover your maternal forebears,” he said. “Alas, you would suspect I was lying. My secretary dug up the information. He claims it was not difficult. He pursued the search through the church, which found one lowly vicar for him just as though the man had never been lost. And indeed he had not been. It is difficult to get lost if one remains in the same place for fifty years.”

“They are alive?” She was still whispering. “My grandparents?” She clasped her hands tightly to her mouth and smiled radiantly at him. “Oh, thank you. Thank you, Avery.”

“I shall pass on your gratitude to Edwin Goddard,” he told her.

“Please do,” she said. “But he would not have thought of making the search all on his own. Why did you ask him to do so?”

He took his snuffbox out of a pocket, gazed absently at it, and put it away again. “You see, Anna,” he said. “I increased his salary a short while ago, and then I had the alarming thought that perhaps I did not make enough of an effort to see that he earned it. I made an effort and thought of the Reverend Snow.”

“How absurd,” she said.

He looked up at her, his eyes keen. “Remember, Anna,” he said, “that they had you taken away after your mother died and apparently showed no further interest in you.”

The door opened behind him at that moment and Elizabeth hurried inside.

“I am so sorry,” she said. “I stepped on the hem of my dress just as I was leaving my dressing room and tore it. I had to change into something else. And then there was all the bother— Oh, no matter. How do you do, Avery?”

“I am delighted,” he said, raising his glass to his eye, “that you were forced to change into this particular dress, Elizabeth. You look ravishing.”

“Oh,” she said, laughing, “and so do you, Avery, as always. I believe we are about to be invaded. I heard a carriage draw up outside as I was leaving my room.”

Within fifteen minutes everyone had arrived and disposed themselves about the drawing room, Alexander as usual standing before the hearth, Avery seated in a corner beyond the window, not participating in the general conversation.

The conversation itself had taken a predictable course. The ball had been triumphantly pronounced the greatest squeeze of the Season so far. Anastasia’s debut had been a success. If there had been a hundred sets in the evening, Aunt Mildred declared, Anastasia would have had a partner for each one. Some ladies had been heard to remark upon the plainness of her appearance, Aunt Louise said, but a few of the most fashionable young ladies, most notably that diamond of the first water, Miss Edwards, had been heard to declare in a huddle together that they were tired of being so loaded down with jewels and of having to catch up trains and flounces whenever they wished to dance and of sitting for an hour or longer each evening while their maids curled and crimped their hair. How refreshing it would be, they had said, to appear in public as Lady Anastasia Westcott had—if only they dared.